Recently at a Linux show, John Littler saw a preview of a new version of KDE running on a KDE
developer's laptop. The interface looked cleaner than before, and
apparently there was a whole raft of new stuff under the hood. John
recently interviewed KDE developer Aaron J. Seigo about the forthcoming
KDE 4 (due in the fall) and also a little about the recent controversy
surrounding the porting of KDE to operating systems other than Linux.
John Littler:
The new features I remember include a bucketload of bug fixes, a
universal messaging client, and a big cleanup of the GUI. Are there
more things that you should mention?
Aaron J. Seigo: For KDE4, there is a lot more than just this. We are:switching to Qt4, which brings a host of new capabilities when it comes to visuals (via the Arthur paint engine) and application design
(improved threading, model/view), as well as having a smaller memory
footprint and allowing us to write non-GUI apps that don't require an X
server
Other additional features include extensive use of SVG graphics which allow for resolution independent images,
improvements to X.org's acceleration architecture,
redesigning applications so
they are able to be optimized better. Seigo explains that "For example, the desktop and
panels are being merged into one app, which also provides for
functionality now only available in Superkaramba. The resulting design
allows us to much more efficiently share application launch, graphics,
and geometry coordination data while also avoiding the overhead of
multiple processes where just one will do quite fine. This will allow
people to have quite flashy desktops (or even simple plain ones) that
are snappier and take fewer resources."
News source: Linux Dev Center
